TEAM REPORTS (FORT WORTH) - Musgrave, No. 9 Team ASE Toyota Finish 9th at Texas Motor Speedway

Ted Musgrave fought to find the handle early on during Friday's Sam's Town 400 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Texas Motor Speedway, but a quick change by crew chief Rick Gay and the team on the final pit stop allowed Musgrave to recover to bring the No. 9 Team ASE Toyota home in ninth. Musgrave's Germain Racing teammate Todd Bodine also recovered from mid-race struggles to record the team's first win of 2007.

"We were just a little bit off with the coil bind setup that we were running," Musgrave said. "When you are a little off with the coil binding, it might as well be a lot off. We pitted under the green during that round of stops and there wasn't really much we could do to adjust it. But with the late caution we came in and made a small change and it made it a lot better. At that point, it's a shame we didn't have some more laps to go because I think we would have easily raced our way up to sixth."

The 167-lap race got off to a halting start with several early cautions. The early cautions hampered Musgrave's efforts to get the feel of the truck in the early laps. The long green runs in the later stages of the race put Musgrave a lap down to the leaders, but he was able to catch the late-race cautions just right and was one of a handful of drivers that stayed just one lap down to the leaders following a round of green flag stops.

"You might be able to tell after a couple of laps if you have a good truck or not," Musgrave said, "but we never got the tire pressures up or anything early on. It was hard for me to tell Rick and the guys what the truck was doing because we didn't run enough laps under green, and the pressures weren't up. Once the pressures came up, we went on that long green flag run, and by then we just had to ride it out until we could get a caution and get it fixed. Once we got it where we wanted it, I thought we were as good as anyone out there. We just needed a little more time to get up there and race those guys."

Musgrave's seventh top-ten finish of the season leaves him ninth in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship standings entering the Michigan 200 at Michigan International Speedway.

"We're going to Michigan with the truck we raced at Kansas," Musgrave said. "Goodyear is taking the same tire, and we ran really well at Kansas so we'll take the same truck and the same basic setup package and see if we can't follow up Todd's win with one of our own."

Musgrave is just nine points behind Rick Crawford for the fourth position in the standings, and 278 points behind leader Mike Skinner heading into the tenth of 25 races.